Early morning is one of loudest, most chaotic times in Lila. Starting around 4:30am, old, screeching radios crackle to life, all the town's dogs and roosters begin their high-octane, interspecies shouting match, and one or two of my neighbors fires up their videoke machine for a predawn lung workout.
When occasion calls for me to wake this early, I'm always amazed at my ability to sleep through the racket any other morning. It's borderline deafening - not at all what you might expect of an otherwise sleepy little town that's not exactly known for its vigor.
Yesterday was just such a morning, as I was jarred into wakefulness by the rather unforgiving alarm clock on my cellphone, which, in a robotic female voice, shouts "The time is 5am! Time to get up! The time is 5am! Time to get up!" until I do so. Then flop out of bed (or rather off of bed, out of mosquito net), climb stiffly down some dangerously steep wooden stairs, and make a beeline for the Starbucks Via.
An hour later I was on a bumping jeepney to Tagbilaran, pressed between a throng of staring high schoolers on their way to school - a reminder that, even it a small town, every time I switch up my routine a bit I run into people who apparently have never seen me before, and that I am indeed something to be gaped at.
Another hour passes and I'm on a bus to Maribojoc, Todd's site on the west coast of Bohol, half an hour north of Tagbilaran. Maribojoc is somewhat famous for its extensive mangrove forests, and today we'll be working to make them a bit more extensive by jamming propagules into rocky, submerged sediment. The marine equivalent of planting a tree.
Driving up the coast I am taken in by how beautiful Bohol is, something I seem to make a regular point of forgetting. Jungle-draped hills pushed up against a placid sea, endless stretches of nipa palms growing densely in flooded lowlands. I try to look at it though someone else's eyes, someone who hasn't been jaded by the frustration of trying to carve out a place here in a town with very little interest in the work that needs to be done.
But on this day there's work to be done, sea creatures to be found, and photos to take. And that's a pretty good day.
The planters planting
A propagule, freshly grounded
A propagule from the last planting, now a wee tree
And now the post-planting snorkel:
A chocolate chip sea star. Colored blue and green instead of the usual tan, and quite shy about it too
Two not-so-shy pipefish
Blue tips
Todd getting some attention from his coworkers
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